8. — the dead mothers club.
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Staten Island, New York
Frankie, Gallo Estate
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“Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, wake up so I can love you, happy birthday to you.”
“I’m already up,” Frankie said, laughing. Popping out of the closet to see Sissy spin around while holding a tray, she grinned even wider. “Didn’t think I could be awake before nine on a Sunday, huh?”
“Only if soccer is involved.”
“But that’s done now, so.” Frankie shimmed into a sundress covered in a motif of handstitched lilacs and then pointed at Sissy’s tray. “What’s all this?”
“Birthday breakfast, one of your favorites, and a little something from me.”
She didn’t usually eat breakfast, but she was trying to do better and...
“It’s French Toast,” Sissy added.
“That’s all I need to know.”
She promptly sat down at the two-person dinette that doubled as a place for her to read or study next to the massive windows overlooking the rear property.
As she’d grown older, her father put a lot of effort into changing her bedroom to suit her age, needs, and wants.
Now, it felt like something mixed between a young woman’s haven and the space of a girl still afraid to let go.
A lot of pink. White, fluffy rugs everywhere.
The big princess bed, too, pink and white, complete with sheer curtains hanging from four posts.
She needed steps to get into it. A few of her photography, shots blown up and framed from their various trips, decorated the walls.
Her trophies and medals for cross country and soccer took up their own corner of shelves.
A pile of dirty laundry in the corner despite the basket, always to Sissy’s chagrin.
As she took her first bite of French Toast, smothered in syrup, Frankie stared around her two-room suite, connected to her own bathroom, and tried to settle how she felt. And the fact that she would be leaving it soon.
“Big day,” Sissy said, taking the seat across from Frankie’s.
“Officially a legal adult. Huge day.”
“So why were you just looking lost for a second there?”
“I figured out this morning, because I know what Daddy’s getting ready for me, that growing up also means letting go. I’m not sure that I’ve been very good at that, and it makes me think a lot about...whatever’s next.”
“I don’t know why you’re surprised that letting go scares you.”
Frankie frowned, stilling instead of taking her next bite. “Huh, why?”
Sissy made it a point to give the room and the things within it a look. “Contrary to how it may look or seem, you went without quite a lot, too. Important things. Things that, at a young age, you deeply understood that you were missing.”
Sissy didn’t specify what those things meant or were. She didn’t have to, either.
“And what ended up filling in those missing things for you, in one way or another, became engrained in a lot of who you are, sweetheart. It won’t be letting it all go to allow yourself space to learn what it means to be an adult, a woman, you, but you will say goodbye to parts of it.
You have to, to get what you want when you figure out what that finally is.
Everyone does. It just looks a little different from person to person. ”
“He still hasn’t asked me, you know,” she pointed out.
Sissy’s gaze jumped between something outside and Frankie. “Asked what—who?”
“Daddy. About what comes after the gap year, if I want to take an offer somewhere to continue soccer while I do it. Anything about it. He hasn’t asked.”
“Maybe he’s scared of letting go, too.”
“You think?”
“What’s crazy is you thinking letting go stops becoming a thing once you get over it the first time.
Life will teach you differently soon enough.
People don’t grow through joy and happiness.
We change and learn from pain and suffering.
Sacrifice. We become better, stronger, and grateful.
Imagine all the letting go that will entail.
And we do it until we die, sweet girl. Call it loving, if you want.
Call it being alive. Those two are usually a large cause of it. ”
The realities of her father’s life, and the loss it contained quieted Frankie as her thoughts became consumed by the large list. Her mother, his wife. Grandparents on both sides. Parents she had never met, like the two uncles he rarely spoke about.
Sissy hummed under her breath, reaching over to tap Frankie’s fork gently and remind her to eat.
She did, taking another bite and making herself chew as the woman said, “Okay, that’s enough sadness for a happy day.
I don’t want to see a frown or tear unless they’re happy ones from here on out. Agreed?”
Frankie smiled around her bite, eventually swallowing it to say, “I’ll try.”
“That’s what counts. Trust me.” Once the food had mostly disappeared from the plate, Sissy reached for the hinged gift box with a pink bow on top.
Suede, and matching in color to the topper, she held it out to Frankie in her palm after she had wiped her mouth and fingers. “Are you ready for your present?”
“You didn’t have to get me anything, Sissy.”
“I’m not getting you something, I’ve giving it to you.”
Frankie’s brow furrowed as Sissy handed the box over. Her fingers hesitated on opening the lid as she asked, “What does that mean?”
“Well, this belonged to my grandmother, and then my mother. Who gave it to my sister on her eighteenth birthday, and then later, my sister gave it to me so that I would always have something of hers.”
“You never talk about them. Your family, I mean. I don’t even know their names.”
Sissy kept those secrets of her life locked up tight. Frankie always thought it strange, but after years of it being a topic no one would discuss, she stopped asking.
“There’s nothing to talk about. They’re long gone, and I had to let them go before God ever found them. You’re my family now.”
“There’s more to it, isn’t there? You don’t want me to know whatever it is.”
Sissy, dark-eyed and pretty, even in her early forties, playfully rolled her eyes. “Today isn’t the day for this conversation.”
“What day is?”
Sissy patted her arm. “Not today. Please. Now, I have no one to pass this onto the way it was given to me. Except you. The closest thing to my own daughter that I’ll ever have. Who better to have it, right? And...I think it will go great with your prom dress.”
Frankie opened the lid at the same time Sissy mentioned prom.
“Oh, shit,” she whispered.
The ring, sitting on a beveled gold band, had a pink, oval cut diamond, a half a dozen carats in size, that sparkled under the chandelier and pot lighting in her bedroom. It rested atop white velvet, waiting to be plucked up and truly admired.
Sissy gave her a pointed look. “Excuse me? That was not the reaction—”
“Oh, my God, no. The ring is beautiful.” She jumped from the chair to launch a hug at Sissy that squeezed the air out of her in a wheeze. “Thank you so much, this is amazing.”
“O-okay, let me g-go,” Sissy stuttered.
She did.
“Sorry.”
Sissy gave her a look. “What was all that swearing for?”
“I forgot about prom.”
Sissy’s eyes widened, and her stare dropped to the floor, and likely the woman waiting down there. “Let me say now, so you are well forewarned, someone else did not.”
···
Frankie tiptoed into her stepmother’s master suite the same way she used to do as a young girl.
Except this time, she wasn’t trying to sneak into Carina’s vanity to stare at all the pretty bottles of perfume or admire the rows and rows of display drawers for her jewelry.
Carina caught her once, and she didn’t yell or throw a fit at all.
She just sat a young Frankie down and explained that she could look all she wanted, but touching was only by permission.
She still remembered the conversation. One of a few that she cared to.
“Consent is important,” Carina had stated calmly, making sure every word was heard and understood. “Even if you’re only asking to touch someone else’s things. Do you remember when we talked about that last time?”
Soon enough, she found Carina.
“Hey,” Frankie whispered, leaning around the entry to the massive closet. “Sissy said you were looking for me?”
Carina glanced up from paperback of Hamlet by Shakespeare and promptly put the book down on the cream-colored chaise at her side. “I said when you had time this morning, no rush.”
“Oh.”
“You think you’d be happier today, turning eighteen. What’s with the pout?”
Frankie cringed, knowing good and well what she said next would likely start something with Carina given she’d asked her stepmother to help with getting ready for prom.
She wondered how to go about spilling the news that she’d totally forgotten it was just two days away, and to put a cherry on top of the cake, she no longer had a date.
“Um, I have something to tell you, and you might be pissed, but—”
“Oh, my God,” Carina interjected, scowling, “you know, don’t you?”
“Know what?”
Carina’s jaws snapped shut instantly, muttering, “Nothing.”
That’s weird.
Frankie eyed her stepmother a little more closely as she stepped beyond the threshold to properly enter what could not be considered just a closet. Not even a walk-in closet properly described the space that stored Carina’s many possessions.
Not only did it have two floors, a spiral staircase, a balcony leading to a private sitting area outside, and two bathrooms, it also included a built-in safe room for the most expensive bags and jewelry in Carina’s collection.
Frankie looked beyond those things to see telltale signs of what Carina might be trying to hide. Just the fact that she woke up to the woman being in the house for three mornings in a row, weeks before graduation, gave her one hint. The thing that really clinched the deal, though?
The open door.
Not the one Frankie entered earlier. Rather, a separate exit to the humongous closet leading to a short hallway where another set of stairs would take someone straight up to her father’s private wing, including his bedroom.
It only locked from her father’s side, not Carina’s.